Fortune Newsroom: How EON Sports VR is using virtual reality to teach football

Colleges and high schools are using Eon Sports’ VR football simulation to train new recruits–and the NFL might be next. Currently several colleges, including UCLA, Ole Miss, Syracuse, and the University of Kansas, and 100 high schools are using Eon Sports VR Sidekiq software to teach football fundamentals to students using the Oculus Rift. Eon Sports VR CEO and co-founder Brendan Reilly expects to add two NFL teams as customers before the 2015 season kicks off this year.

With everyone from fighter pilots to surgeons training in VR, Reilly, a former University of Kansas basketball coach, thought sports could benefit from virtual reality. In 2010, he approached Eon Reality, one of the oldest American VR companies, which was founded in 1999. In summer 2013 Eon Sports VR was born and by February 2014 the company had its first product available, Sidekiq.

Eon Sports teamed up with NFL quarterback coach Steve Clarkson, whose clients include Ben Roethlisberger, Tim Tebow and Matt Leinart, to offer anyone with a smartphone and VR headset a private coach that will analyze your game mechanics. The software tracks what the player does and then offers guidance on what to go back and work on.